Choose A Craft Carefully

If you are a young person in this modern world today, go to school, get as much education as you possibly can, you will be thankful for it as you get older. Choose an occupation or craft that fits your natural abilities. Each person has different talents some mental, others manual that are ready to burst out at a certain stage of life. If high costs keep you from going to a College, consider a vocational technical school. They can do an outstanding job preparing you for the working world. You could work part-time while you are going to school and when you graduate move right into a full-time job. Most schools have job placement services with employers, standing in line, anxious to interview each new graduate.

When I think about it now, in my advanced stage of life, I’ve never really had a craft or single occupation, maybe tinker. You might say I was doomed from the beginning. I was born a Jack Of All Trades. Luckily, I mastered a few of them. My jobs took me all over the country. I have tried and done or learned to do almost any type of job you can imagine. This did not set up a very balanced, ordinary lifestyle, one of comfort and security at a permanent location. Educated at the school of hard knocks! Choose your profession or craft carefully, then your spouse and your house, live a orderly, normal life The American Dream.

Being a Jack Of All Trades requires your wife learning early on in the marriage, not to volunteer your services. We have been married 46 years, she has been my project manager all that time. Free repair work is easy to sell! It never seemed to make a lot of difference who it was or where we were at. It didn’t even have to be in our local town, to a stranger even, my wife would offer my services. It would always start out like this, “My husband can fix that, he would be very glad to repair that for you.” “It will not cost you anything.” I sure ended up with a lot of friends that way and a few free lunches.

My poor physical condition finally changed my work routine. I could no longer be the volunteered, repair person for planet Earth. I thought my little world had come to an end. Free repair work would get me out of this two bedroom cage, with one roost. It has slowly come to a rolling stop, like a 49 Ford with bad brakes.

I skipped my education so I don’t know it was through the process of osmosis or over-ripening, somehow my ex-repair life ended. I have morphed into what I like to call My writing life. I find myself again on the horns of a dilemma. “Is my writing a craft or is it art?” I asked my wife, She said, “NEITHER.”